BRIDGE OF SPIES RECALLS A TENSE PERIOD IN THE COLD WAR
New York insurance attorney James B. Donovan (played by Tom Hanks), having earlier participated as an assistant prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, is identified early in the film as a sharp negotiator. When Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Soviet spy, is arrested in New York, the local bar nominates Donovan as the defense lawyer in a kangaroo court trial, which irks him so much that he appeals for a retrial and loses, but successfully pleads to have the spy kept alive in prison in case an American is later caught so that an exchange will be possible. Occurring at the height of the Cold War, he then encounters evil stares on the subway, and even gunshots pierce the window of his Brooklyn residence. Then in 1957, Captain Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) becomes that American, having been downed from his U-2 spy plane onto Soviet territory just as the wall is being constructed around East Berlin. Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), an American economics graduate student from Yale is caught inside the wall, so when Donovan is assigned to make the Abel-Powers exchange, he wants to include Pryor as well. Much of the film, directed by Steven Spielberg, focuses on Donovan’s negotiations in East Berlin with East German and Soviet officials. That Donovan has no official governmental capacity leads his interlocutors to believe that he is a member of the CIA. But American and East German government officials want a 1-for-1 trade, not a 2-for-1 trade, fearing that Donovan’s humanitarian impulse will squelch the deal. It would be a spoiler to reveal whether he gets his way. But titles at the end report that he was asked to negotiate for the release of about 1,000 Americans held in Castro’s Cuba after the revolution, and in fact he secured freedom for more than 9,000! The Political Film Society has nominated Bridge of Spies for best film exposé of 2015 for revealing the caper, previously little known, though based on Donovan’s now forgotten book Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers (1964). MH
WOODLAWN PLEADS FOR CHRISTIAN LOVE TO SOLVE RACE PROBLEMS
Races have been brought together through American sports at various levels, but until Woodlawn, the transformation of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1973/74 had not been told on the screen. When the film begins, documentary footage provides some context of the era. Then African American students are bussed to a former all-White school, and a scuffle breaks out. Inside the basketball court, the football team collects both Blacks and Whites nursing fears of each other. Lay evangelist Hank (played by Sean Astin) then appears out of nowhere to rouse them to join together as part of the “Jesus Revolution.” The team thus aroused surprises the city with victories in which the main star is Tony Nathan (played by Caleb Castille), who later played for the Miami Dolphins. A skeptical coach is converted, but a Supreme Court decision disallowing prayer at a public school is vilified. With a music score well designed to stir emotions, the film ends with ads for future “Jesus Revolution” events in 2016. Directors Andrew and Jon Erwin thereby cheapen the message by commercializing a memorable true story and thus fail to outshine the secular-oriented Remember the Titans (2000), which features events in northern Virginia during 1971. MH